Sisters Injured In Boston Marathon Bombing Share Their Story
BOSTON (CBS) -- The photograph of Nicole Brannock Gross in the seconds after a bomb went off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon was splashed across newspapers around the world.
Gross and her sister Erika Brannock were at the 26-mile mark cheering on their mother Carol Browning.
Eager to get a better view, the sisters moved just shy of the finish line, a few feet away from where the first bomb went off.
The sisters sat down with CBS This Morning Wednesday to share their story.
"For me personally, I remember the sound and being flown back and there was instant silence. I remember the smell of the bomb," Gross, a personal trainer in North Carolina, told CBS News' Lee Woodruff.
The blasts left Gross with broken bones, a severed Achilles and several wounds. Her sister, a preschool teacher in Baltimore, lost her left leg and has gone through multiple surgeries to save her right leg. She is expected to be discharged from the hospital on Friday.
Erika said one of the hardest things for her was when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was admitted to the same hospital.
"I started having nightmares, he was going to get out of his bed, come out of his room and blow the hospital up," Brannock said.
Both sisters said they would have nothing to say to Tsarnaev today and instead, are focused on the future.
"It's a closeness that I think is indescribable," Gross said of her relationship with her sister. "There's not many sisters or brothers and sisters that will go through something like this and I don't wish that on anybody, but I think we were able to communicate our love for one another in a way we weren't able to before."
